Jon Trickett: ‘Labour must not fail to seize the moment with its fresh landslide majority’

I have served the party in a number of key positions, Leader of Leeds Council but also in Parliament, in the Shadow Cabinet  and even in No 10 Downing Street.

Wherever political power is to be found, I saw close-up  people and institutions attempting to gain influence over decision making ino order to seek preferential treatment for their own special interest. Of course Britain is a large country made of very many different groups – each with their own needs, and desires. But when you boil it down, the pressures on economic policy are centered on two entrenched interests.

But there can be no doubt which of these two groups is the most powerful.  You might imagine that in a democracy, that the larger group in the population would always come out on top. That is what the textbooks would say. You would be wrong to make this assumption.  The facts of the case leave no room for doubt.

The wealthiest in Britain

In Britain there are 1,000 extremely wealthy people. Their wealth has increased by £533 billion since the crash. And there are about 37 million people who work. But the wealth and income of these millions of people has gone down hugely over the same relative period of time.

Whilst the wealth of the tiny group of the richest and that of the big corporations has gone through the roof, look at the situation in which working people find themselves. Nearly 2 million are self employed – many of them forced by unscrupulous employers – who are on two thirds the average wage. One in nine workers find themselves in insecure employment and one in thirty on zero hours contracts. The truth is that the British State always bends towards serving the entrenched interests of wealth.

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This is my experience. But it’s not a new idea. Many years ago I got to know Ralph Miliband whose famous book analysed in great depth the subordination of our state structures to the interests of capitalism.

The thousand richest people live in a land where 14 million are in poverty. But it’s not only inequality which is damaging the social fabric. When so many people  are excluded from social goods such as the NHS , and when those services are damaged after decades of cuts, the cohesion of communities inevitably is under threat. And the personal liberty which capitalism proclaims to be its primary virtue is lost.  For example, the right to a home, access to medical treatment or even in some cases to sufficient food.

Neoliberalism’s broken promise that you can live the dream breaks down into a fragmented, alienated and cynical civic response.  It  provides fertile soil for the growth of the far right. Germany’s recent regional elections in the context of a political class unable to break through the constraints of the global economy and damaged labour market shows us one possible future for the UK.

So when it comes to the power of the majority’s needs  over the minority’s which democracy was created to ensure, we must conclude that it has failed. Think back to the Chartists and the other movements, the demand for working class MP’s, the suffragettes, who all fought for democracy in the belief that it would lead to the emancipation of the poor and weak from poverty and insufferable employment conditions.

What Labour stands for

The Labour Party’s primary raison d’etre was to deliver social justice for the very oppressed groups which had first created and then voted for us. It would be a colossal falsehood to pretend that our Party had not significantly improved the lives of our supporters over the last century.

But too often, and frequently as a consequence of external factors, our Labour governments were limited in what they could achieve. We cannot reasonably argue that case now. The Conservative forces in Britain have decisively been split down the middle, and in any event they have been shamed by their venal behaviour in office.  As well as their downright incompetence.

And so we have arrived at a singular moment in the politics of our country’s history. With a huge parliamentary majority and demoralized and disorientated opposition.  There can therefore be no excuse at all, none whatsoever, for our government to fail to deliver social justice and emancipate the poor; our pensioners, our children, our disabled, and our exploited working people.

The only thing which might inhibit us is if our leaders fail to seize the moment out of timidity, lack of a clear strategy or simply complacent drift.

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Of course, we have a difficult fiscal position bequeathed to us by Sunak and his gang. But in the 5th most wealthy country in the world there can be no excuse at all for the scale of difficulties faced by working people. The answer surely lies in tackling the gross and indeed obscene maldistribution of Britain’s wealth.

Over the course of a parliament, I estimate that a wealth tax alone can raise almost £100 billion.  Enough to make massive strides forward in correcting the hideous state of some of public service, to build a green economy and tackle poverty.

So let me finish these thoughts where I began. And this relates to asymmetry of power in our democracy. The millionaires have apparently unlimited access to power. The millions much less so.

The answer in large part is to build a force from below that is so strong that the Government will fulfill Labour’s historic promise of strong communities, civil and socio-economic liberty and equality. The question is can we mobilise all the collective strength of our movement to act as a counterweight to the power of the capitalists.

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